Smashing Newsletter

For his last monthly update in 2018, Anselm summarized what has happened in the web development community in the past few weeks. Get ready for browser news, handy tools, lessons learned, and thought-provoking reads.

It’s the last edition of this year, and I’m pretty stoked what 2018 brought for us, what happened, and how the web evolved. Let’s recap that and remind us of what each of us learned this year: What was the most useful feature, API, library we used? And how have we personally changed?

For this month’s update, I’ve collected yet another bunch of articles for you. If that’s not enough reading material for you yet, you can always find more in the archive or the Evergreen list which contains the most important articles since the beginning of the Web Development Reading List. I hope your days until the end of the year won’t be too stressful and wish you all the best. See you next year!

Firefox will soon offer users a browser setting to block all permission requests automatically. This will affect autoplaying videos, web notifications, geolocation requests, camera and microphone access requests. The need to auto-block requests shows how horribly wrong developers are using these techniques. Sad news for those who rely on such requests for their services, like WebRTC calling services, for example.

General

We’ve finally come up with ways to access and use websites offline with amazing technology. But one thing we forgot about is that for the past thirty years we taught people that the web is online, so most people don’t know that offline usage even exists. A lesson in user experience design and the importance of reminding us of the history of the medium we’re building for.

UI/UX

Erica Hall shows us examples of why most of ‘UX design’ is a myth and why not only design makes a great product but also the right product strategy and business model. The best example why you should read this is when Erica writes “Virgin America. Rdio. Google Reader. Comcast. Which of these offered a good experience? Which of these still exists?” A truth you can’t ignore and, luckily, this is not a pessimistic but very thought-provoking article with great tips for how we can use that knowledge to improve our products. With strategy, with design, with a business model that fits.

Is it still a good idea to use JavaScript for loading web fonts? Zach Leatherman shares why we should decide case by case and why it’s often best to use modern CSS and font-display: swap;.

Doka is a new standalone JavaScript image editor worth keeping in mind. While it’s not a free product, it features very handy methods for editing with a pleasant user experience, and by paying an annual fee, you ensure that you get bugfixes and support.

“The Power of Web Components” shares the basic concepts, how to start using them, and why using your own HTML elements instead of gluing HTML, the related CSS classes, and a JavaScript trigger together can simplify things so much.

Security

Scott Helme shares information about a new security header that we can make use of: Clear Site Data allows site owners to clear data from cache, (local/session/permanent) storage, or cookies. This could be useful to delete sensitive or private data stored in localStorage or authentication cookies easily.

Another security incident happened with a very popular npm package: event-stream was published with malware code that steals specific Bitcoin wallets from computers. Please check the dependencies on your machine and ensure you update to the latest package versions. npm audit also helps identify such issues.

Privacy

Do you have a husband or wife? Kids? Other relatives? Then this essential guide to protecting your family’s data is something you should read and turn into action. The internet is no safe place, and you want to ensure your relatives understand what they’re doing — and it’s you who can protect them by teaching them or setting up better default settings.

Amazon’s cloud unit launches Arm-based server chips, and by that, they’re able to reduce costs by about 45% (e.g. for web servers). This means that the energy consumption is much lower and overall efficiency is higher which is a good sign for our planet as well. We need more of these evolutionary infrastructure upgrades that lower the impact of tech on our climate.

Work & Life

Ozoemena Nonso tries to explain why we often aren’t happy. The thief of our happiness is not comparing ourselves with others; it’s that we struggle to get the model of comparison right. An incredibly good piece of life advice if you compare yourself with others often and feel that your happiness suffers from it.

Jeffrey Silverstein is a teacher and struggled a lot with finding time for side projects while working full-time. Now he found a solution which he shares with us in this great article about “How to balance full-time work with creative projects.” An inspiring read that I can totally relate to.

Ben Werdmüller shares his thoughts on why lifestyle businesses are massively underrated. But what’s a lifestyle business? He defines them as non-venture-funded businesses that allow their owners to maintain a certain level of income but not more. As a fun sidenote, this article shows how crazy rental prizes have become on the U.S. West Coast.

Jake Knapp shares how he survived six years with a distraction-free smartphone — no emails, no notifications. And he has some great tips for us and an exercise to try out. I recently moved all my apps into one folder on the second screen to ensure I need to search for the app which usually means I really want to open it and don’t just do it to distract myself.

Ryan Avent wrote about why we work so hard. This essay is well-researched and explains why we see work as crucial, why we fall in love with it, and why our lifestyle and society embraces to work harder all the time.